A Woman Between Exiles: Gender, Emotions and Non-Conformity in Irmgard Keun’s Private and Fictional Writings, 1933–1936

This chapter takes the German writer Irmgard Keun as a key case study to explore intersections between inner and territorial exile. Focussing on 1933–1936, the chapter demonstrates that Keun’s experiences and writings between and across the exilic divide were not only sequential, but also simultaneous, hybrid and liminal. In particular, it explores Keun’s private letters to her exiled Jewish lover and her collection of short stories Das Mädchen, mit dem die Kinder nicht verkehren durften (The girl with whom the children were not allowed to associate, 1936), two sets of texts which also crossed the border between Nazi Germany and territorial exile, and which illustrate Keun’s ‘in-betweenness’ in multiple ways. In doing so, the chapter highlights the importance of gender and emotional practices as sites of conflict between socio-political control and individual subversive agency, and argues that the ways in which Keun ‘does’ gender and emotions are an integral part of how she ‘does’ non-conformity and exile. Keun’s distinctive exilic experiences, moreover, shed light on the continuous negotiation of tensions between resignation and withdrawal, on the one hand, and activism and resistance, on the other, which was symptomatic of the exilic condition more generally.